[First published on Mercatornet.com] The most decorous thing to do in the Tiger Woods affair would be to avert one’s gaze. I feel especially sad for his children who, whatever the outcome, will in this internet age be pursued by the grisly details all their lives. But, in respectful disagreement with MercatorNet’s editor Michael Cook, I argue that, with as much decorum as we can muster, we need to examine squarely the partly hopeful lessons of this sad business.

I don’t mean lessons like “Don’t cheat on your spouse.” It is true and important but we could discuss it without staring at this sordid mess. As for an enormously successful, wealthy, sexy man having plentiful opportunities to stray beyond the bonds of matrimonial fidelity, Louis XIV knew all about that and so I imagine did Rameses II. And while they didn’t know the internet could deliver every unpleasant detail to the prurient, we certainly do.

On the other hand, sordid misconduct by those who seem to enjoy life’s blessings, and those of our society, deserves some notice. When people complain about the muck in the media I often quote my former boss at the Ottawa Citizen, Neil Reynolds, who said that a newspaper is a daily measure of the moral state of a community. When the weather is lousy, I add, you don’t smash the barometer. Those maxims would not justify wallowing in the sordid details of what the press have a habit of calling Tiger Woods’ “affairs” -- although his encounters don’t seem to have risen even to that level -- but my own opinion on reading the barometer is that we can expect slightly better than predicted weather.

What strikes me about this mess, and encourages me, is that even in this liberated age, the overall result of the scandal has been revulsion. In 2005 I began a newspaper column with, “As the narrator of Russell Kirk’s ghost story The Invasion of the Church of the Holy Ghost wanders the sordid main drag of his decaying parish, a neon sign above a stripper bar flashes ‘Stark Naked or Your Money Back’. What a slogan for our times.” I still think so. But the short version of the Tiger Woods business is, “Stark Naked and our Money Back.” As it should be.

From golfing fans to the general public and to Mr. Woods’ commercial sponsors, the general reaction has not been to excuse or diminish his conduct but “Ugh, get away from me.” The mass of humanity in the West has, it appears, managed to resist the siren song of sexual modernity far better than we had feared.

The metaphysics of modernity was expressed very nicely by Malcolm Muggeridge in 1966 when he said, “Sex is the mysticism of materialism. We are to die in the spirit to be reborn in the flesh, rather than the other way around.” It was obvious from the start to many people that this plan was fatally flawed. But it is nice to see that most normal people’s reaction to Tiger Woods is that, after 50 years letting it all hang out, we would like to see much of it get tucked back in.

It is somewhat unfair that all this should land on Tiger Woods. To some extent celebrity carries an unfair price. But Tiger Woods was always interesting for three reasons, two inherent and one self-inflicted. The first inherent reason was sheer talent; it was amazing to see how good a human being could be at something at which many of us have failed ignominiously. The second was application; it was intriguing to see how much he could make of his enormous natural gifts both within his chosen field of endeavour and as a human being. The third is that he marketed himself assiduously as, among other things, clean-cut. In this last respect Tiger Woods differs even from admitted bad boy golfer John Daly whose misconduct, while reprehensible, escapes the reproach of hypocrisy, and even more from Bobby Fischer, whose chess genius brought fame he neither sought nor enjoyed and that turned his descent into anti-Semitic madness from a private tragedy into a public scandal.

The talent and the on-course achievements remain amazing. But what he did with his success off the course attracts attention for solid moral reasons as well as ignoble Schadenfreude. Even on the infamous night in which Tiger Woods’ life unravelled publicly the thought may have surfaced briefly that all his achievements made no difference as he fled a woman scorned and wronged. Certainly, in the aftermath, even those of us unlikely to romp to victory in our first Masters are usefully reminded that managing to stagger along the straight and narrow path matters more than any other achievement mundane or spectacular.

A few columnists (female, no less) have suggested that Tiger Woods did what any typical man would do given the opportunity, or that his failings make him seem more human. I personally hope for more from men and mankind. And I am encouraged by the way this matter is unfolding.

Tiger Woods betrayed his wife and his children and broke the moral law and is being heartily condemned. Some say he may one day recover his standing in the world of golf and with the public. And perhaps he will. But if so it will not be by clever PR or clever golf shots. It will be through genuine repentance and improved character.

I am sorry it happened at all, and for the sake of the children in particular I cringe at the public way it happened. But despite all the pounding away at traditional morality in the last century and especially the last 40 years, despite the saturation of popular culture by the Playboy philosophy, we all still know this sort of thing is wrong. And despite everything we still care.

That is worth noting.

The Greenpeace stunt on Parliament Hill last week went over my head. Literally. I arrived for a conference while they rappelled down West Block before an audience of emergency responders and media. I was actually lost; my event was elsewhere. But I eventually found it, whereas respect for the rule of law is still missing.

I promise not to talk about the substance of that protest. I know people think nothing is more important than climate change; Wednesday's Daily Telegraph quoted British Prime Minister Gordon Brown saying that the "'future of humanity' is at stake in the Copenhagen climate talks." Under such circumstances, fussing about the rule of law might appear more irrelevant than sinister. But what's the point in passing laws, on climate change or anything else, if the concept of orderly procedure is receding faster than a Swiss glacier?

It seems odd to me that the Copenhagen meeting has witnessed endless disorderly protests by people demanding something be done about the environment. If you were a global warmer, I'd have expected you to think existing processes were working pretty well at this point. Isn't everyone who is anyone at Copenhagen, including Mr. Brown, U.S. President Barack Obama, Prince Charles, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Al Gore and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, all demanding immediate massive action or everybody dies? Aren't rafts of expensive experts working day and night to create workable plans to combat global warming regardless of the expense?

If the red greens were marching in support of the program, or making orderly objections on details, or if there was chaos in the streets because the conference had been cancelled, it would make some kind of sense. But rioting in their moment of triumph raises the crucial question: "Why can't these people make their case without breaking the law?"

It is not as though the digital age offers a shortage of ways to spread even an unpopular message. Besides, climate alarmists enjoy the sympathy of virtually every major media outlet and most political parties, with the partial exceptions of U.S. Republicans and Australian Liberals. So why are activists going up the wall, literally and figuratively?

As it happens, the conference I did eventually reach on Monday, sponsored by the Canadian Centre for Policy Studies, was on the erosion of rights in Canada. And on my panel Peter Stockland, executive director of the Centre for Cultural Renewal, addressed precisely this puzzling rise of youthful hordes convinced it is their right to hijack debate by illegal acts. It is a trend whose ominous shadow reaches far beyond any one issue, however vital.

Civil disobedience acquired a saintly aura during the civil rights protests of the early 1960s as people like Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi broke the law in an orderly and non-violent way, in defence of unfashionable causes and willing to suffer legal penalties. Today's disruptors ape that tradition but do not belong to it.

They break the law in disorderly ways, in defence of fashionable causes, knowing there is no penalty. Where protestors in the 1960s broke the law to challenge the Establishment, today's crop do it to support authority and with its blessing. Even the West Block event was pure theatre. The official response was relaxed, even leisurely, and the police and persons of fire I saw quietly watching the Greenpeace stunt were supporting actors in a familiar, harmless comedy called "Stick it to the man" when everybody knows there is, in fact, no man.

The immediate dangers of such contempt for law are obvious; as Senator Colin Kenny asked, what if they'd been terrorists? And the recent assault on Italy's Silvio Berlusconi underlines that degrading personal assaults on right-wing politicians are not just good, clean left-wing fun. (Man throws shoe at George Bush: hilarious. Man throws shoe at Barack Obama: outrageous, probably racist.) But there's a deeper issue.

Progressive politicians may tolerate this lawlessness for several reasons, including camouflage and intimidation. Next to the mob in the street, elected officials look both prudent and wise, and if you don't let us give the economy to Burundi, your bank and coffee shop windows will get it, and maybe your legislature as well. But under such conditions law itself disintegrates. And then what? If Copenhagen produces a real plan, the transparent fraudulence of law in much of the Third World means it won't be carried out in key developing nations. Do we want that here?

For now, forget your position on climate change. Just ask whether lawlessness is good policy on crucial issues. You can't ignore it, because it can now clamber all over our system of self-government and no one seems surprised, let alone alarmed.

Are we all in over our heads?

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Columnists, like tourists, must resist the impulse to shout when speaking normally does not get them what they want. But, with snow piling up outside, the climate change industry jetsetting around Copenhagen, and billions of dollars at stake, it is necessary to make a few observations about the real "deniers" on this issue.

Consider an Agence France-Presse story that made its way into Wednesday's Citizen and who knows how many other newspapers around the world. It began, "If the evidence is overwhelming that man-made climate change is already upon us and set to wreak planetary havoc, why do so many people refuse to believe it? The UN's panel of climate scientists, in a landmark report, described the proof of global warming as 'unequivocal.' That was two years ago, and since then hundreds of other studies have pointed to an ever-bleaker future... Yet surveys from around world reveal deep-seated doubt among the public."

To explain this important state of affairs, the story went on to quote a philosophy professor at the University of London blaming "the individual reluctance to give up our comfortable lifestyles" and "a professor of psychology at Knox University in Illinois" that "We are told a thousand times a day, notably through advertising, that the way to a happy, successful and meaningful life is through consumption" before suggesting "a darker explanation. It is the human instinct to shut out or modify a terrifying truth: that the world as we know it is heading for a smash."

I cannot help wondering how many readers, after the crucial opening sentence, said we must get the views of a professor of psychology at Knox University in Illinois. A far more rational response would be to ask scientists: Is the evidence so "overwhelming"? Which got me wondering: Who does AFP assign to cover this vexed scientific question anyway? According to one of their websites, the author of this article has been with AFP since 1995 and "Before becoming a health, science and environment reporter in January 2007, he worked in the agency's news graphics service, as a lifestyle editor, and in a business development unit for new media." If the media have a former lifestyle editor interview a professor of psychology at a university you never heard of and pronounce ex cathedra on science, it may not be a great mystery why circulation and revenues are declining. Moreover, at the risk of spoiling the lavish Copenhagen party, including importing limousines from around Europe to pamper the simple-lifestyle elite, I venture to suggest that, in addition to doubts about details, the public is aware that science does not proclaim dogma and excommunicate heretics the way the alarmists claim it does.

Long before global warming was a gleam in Al Gore's eye, Richard Weaver criticized the use of "science says" as a high rhetorical trump card in the modern era. "Science is not," he warned, "as here it would seem to be, a single concrete entity speaking with one authoritative voice .... there are many scientists holding many different theories and employing many different methods of investigation. The whole force of the word nevertheless depends upon a bland assumption that all scientists meet periodically in synod and there decide and publish what science believes. Yet anyone with the slightest scientific training knows that this is very far from a possibility."

Many members of the public know at least that much about science. Those who've done a little homework on climate change know climate is immensely variable in ways the computer models can't explain even for known past events. They know many scientists dispute the claims of the warmers even though great gobs of government money are available only to those who endorse the panic. And now they know that statistical chicanery as well as rhetorical bludgeoning has been employed to conceal the extent of scientific uncertainty. But this truth cannot be hidden or ignored any longer.

Let me therefore praise a very revealing piece of honesty that appeared in the National Post on Saturday. Britain's High Commissioner to Canada, described as a "climate-change believer," opened a print debate with Terence Corcoran on global warming with "I will grant that climate science is in its infancy. There are so many variables, positive and negative feedback loops and cycles within cycles that only fools or rogues pretend to be sure of what is going on. Our climate models are barely predictive."

Indeed. Only rogues and fools pretend to be sure. But that's what's blaring out of Copenhagen, amplified by too many uninformed journalists.

That is why there is so much doubt among members of the public. And given the importance of the issue, scientifically and economically, it bears repeating.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

The first impulse of the global warmers is to brush off the leaked e-mails about fiddling numbers and silencing adversaries. The drumbeat of political and journalistic propaganda for "Copenhagen" took precious little notice of it. But like the frog in a pot, they're going to get boiled without even noticing until it's too late.

If the hacking was illegal it must be investigated. But it blew the whistle on a scandal of the first order and forces scientists to take a stand. Whatever their field or view of climate change, they know this wasn't proper science. It was bullying.

Of course bullies can be right. The global warming thesis could be correct even if some of its defenders manipulated data and behaved thuggishly. But such behaviour strongly suggests they were afraid to make their scientific case honestly and people are going to ask why. When they do they're going to find trouble a-plenty.

I suggest curious laymen start with Ian Plimer's Heaven and Earth: Global Warming the Missing Science. There's no using the "not peer reviewed" canard here; he's an award-winning professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences and his book is a compilation of well-established facts.

I've struggled with how to present Heaven and Earth ever since I read it. I could pile up zingers like "That great ball of heat in the sky drives climate." But it would misrepresent the tone of the work, a masterful compilation of what we know about climate (and, more troublingly, what we don't). Thus his chapter "The Sun" not only exhaustively catalogues Sol's impact on warming and cooling the Earth, but details similar effects on Mars, Jupiter and Triton, which I trust not even Al Gore could blame on humans.

Plimer's only problem is the proverbial drink from a fire hydrant. Page after page of things like "There is a 25-month fluctuation of sun-spots and, superimposed on the 11-year cycle (Schwabe Cycle) and 22.2 year cycle (Hale Cycle), are other solar cycles (33 year Bruckner Cycle, 87-year Gleissberg Cycle, 210-year DeVries-Suess Cycle and the 1500 ± 500 year Dansgaard-Oeschger Cycle)" gets a little overwhelming. There's something in-your-face about 2,311 footnotes, and in places I felt he'd put everything he knows on file cards, sorted them into the best possible order then hit "Print."

In places we get more data than information. But I'd like to hear politicians and journalists who say the science is beyond question or compare skeptics to Holocaust deniers dispute Plimer's conclusion that "The main cycles that have driven past climate change on Earth are the Schwabe, Hale, Gleissberg and Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles. There are no reasons to suppose anything different for the future." When they're done, they can try to refute his meticulous detailing of the Earth's history or the chemistry and physics of glaciers, water and air.

If they fail, here's what remains. Climate has always been enormously variable. There is much we do not understand about Earth's frequent dramatic freezing and sudden warming, but what we do know does not support the alarmists' clichés. We have an enormous amount of data, and Plimer subjects us to most of it; to cite just one example, massive glaciation 450 million years ago happened with far more atmospheric CO2 than today. By the time he's done poking holes in the warmers' balloon, it's not just empty, it's shredded.

I do not say this is good news. Climate is not susceptible to study using the mathematical methods that have proved so fruitful in the past 500 years in chemistry, physics, optics and so on. That means we cannot predict events that might prove catastrophic. For instance, the warming at the end of the last Ice Age, which made civilization possible, suddenly and dramatically reversed 13,000 years ago. Earth plunged into the "Younger Dryas" deep freeze in less than 100 years, possibly in a single decade, and stayed there for about 13 centuries. Should such a thing happen now, mass death would be unavoidable. Will it? We just can't tell. The computer models can't even run known past data and predict the Younger Dryas. And if they can't predict the past, they certainly can't predict the future.

Plimer also shows that warmer periods have favoured civilization and colder ones have brought upheaval, war, death and the fall of Rome. That doesn't justify wreaking havoc on the environment. But it does remind us that we know of a huge number of temperature fluctuations that cannot be linked to man-made emissions of methane or CO2 and that the mighty climate predictors can't explain even when they're not employing some statistical "trick" to hide their existence.

Concern for the environment is a good thing. But there's no excuse for cooking the books on cooking the planet. And this time they won't get away with it.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Last Saturday I spent the day trying to organize a chant of "It is no act of Parliament, unless it be made by the King, the Lords and Commons." It didn't go very well. But I'm not easily discouraged.

It doesn't help that, in Canada, you have to substitute Senate for Lords. But on a panel at St. Paul's University discussing "Can the Senate act as a catalyst for informed public engagement in ethical policy making?" I said it was certainly worth a try. We're not overloaded with public engagement or ethical policymaking these days. The great obstacle to the Senate playing this role, I noted with regret, is the same one it faces whenever it tries to do anything worthwhile: Widespread public conviction that Senators are illegitimate participants in government because they are not elected.

This objection overlooks that democracy is a means toward good government, not an end in itself. A pedantic quibble? Well, few people mind that we don't vote for judges, who comprise one of three branches of government. I never heard anyone complain that public servants aren't elected even though they now generate much of the policy rubber-stamped by MPs. And today, when the ship of state is all sail and no anchor, a good case can be made that an unelected upper house is good for parliamentary government.

Following Richard Weaver's The Ethics of Rhetoric, let me ask what the Senate is meant to be before rushing into what it should do and how. I answer that it is intended as a brake upon the autocratic ambitions of the Executive, and the demagogic ambitions and reckless haste of the House of Commons. If someone has a plan for electing senators to make the Senate better able to do those things I'm keen to hear it. And if anyone is so bold, or foolhardy, as to say today we need less sober second thought in legislating, they too may speak up. Meanwhile, I shall proceed with my chant.

It comes from Edward Coke in the early 17th century. His immediate concern was that the monarch would proclaim laws on his own or with the fig leaf of assent of the Lords, brushing aside protests from the Commons. I realize Queen Elizabeth isn't about to usurp our liberties. But his larger concern about executive power is acutely relevant now that cabinet has fused with the public service and largely absorbed Parliament. Today, Coke's three separate agencies jealous of one another have been replaced by an omnipotent hybrid dominated by a small group around the prime minister and in the upper civil service before whom backbench as well as opposition MPs are effectively helpless.

Only the Senate can now stand in the way of this juggernaut. So I find it paradoxical that the people most irritated by the narrow autocratic style of, say, the Harper Tories are also generally most determined to get rid of the two independent bastions of constitutional authority that must also assent to legislation.

One of my fellow panelists observed that many nations get by with unicameral legislatures. But most places I'd be willing to live have upper houses, including Canada, Britain, Australia, the U.S., France, Germany and Japan. And while our provincial governments lack second chambers and are not conspicuously worse than our federal one, the weakness of our Senate deprives the comparison of much of its value.

Electing the Senate might seem the obvious way to reinvigorate it. But let us reason from first principles. As Jean-Louis de Lolme suggested a quarter-millennium ago, unelected upper houses are structurally a brake on populism because they cannot aspire to seize executive power, alone or in company with the Commons, in the name of "the people." They stand for the people's liberties precisely because they cannot embody the popular will.

Mind you, as a fellow panelist rightly observed on Saturday, the great weakness of the Senate is an appointment process that undermines public trust. It's not obvious that the electoral process is doing wonders for the Commons in this regard either. But prime ministers do have a vested interest in appointments that discredit their only effective institutional opponent. And if the Governor General, who actually appoints senators, won't reject a few as insufficiently distinguished and dare the PM to fire her, we may need to ponder the Australian method of electing senators, and of resolving deadlock between the two houses.

These are details. And details matter. But we must begin with this crucial point: When a breakdown of the separation of powers has left legislative authority in the hands of demagogues who wrap reckless profligacy in a skilful counterfeit of the popular will, our upper house needs more power and authority, not ridicule, abolition, or conversion into a spare tire for the Commons.

So chant it with me: "It is no act of Parliament ..."

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

What price honour? Less than $1 million per soldier, according to the Obama administration. Which is a lot of money, I admit. But strategic ruin and national shame are not costless either. Nor is cluelessness disguised as sophistication.

This bleak reflection is prompted by a New York Times report that "While President Obama's decision about sending more troops to Afghanistan is primarily a military one, it also has substantial budget implications that are adding pressure to limit the commitment, senior administration officials say." Including insisting each military option "include the quickest possible exit strategy."

To suggest openly that America's willingness to confront threats and convey determination has been sold for scrap is unbelievably reckless. Watching this administration flail it has struck me that while amateur idiots are usually less dangerous than professionals it is not true in foreign policy. But in one alarming sense we should not blame the jokers now in power in Washington.

Barack Obama's grovelling bows to the King of Saudi Arabia and the Emperor of Japan reinforce the impression he is a silly man with a silver tongue, whose grasp of foreign affairs goes no deeper than an undergraduate reflex to blame American arrogance for international tension. But a much more profound problem underlies his budgetary blather over Afghanistan and conspicuous display of weakness on his China visit. Apparently the U.S. can afford cash for clunkers, a car company, huge bank bailouts and a vast expansion of free health care. It just can't afford national security. And Barack Obama didn't cause this problem though he is certainly not helping by word or deed.

Last spring the University of Ottawa hosted a fascinating yet scary talk on the U.S. federal budget by Cindy Williams, a principal research scientist at MIT. Her key argument was that unless some way were found to contain the runaway costs of entitlement programs, the United States would be obliged to withdraw from a global security role for want of money regardless of any other considerations. To my surprise, her charts showed the main culprit as health care, not Social Security. And while Democrats on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue seem determined dramatically to inflate the cost of socialized medicine, neither the excuses made nor the commitments flubbed by any specific administration or Congress are much more than foam on this tidal wave.

I take no cheap shot at the U.S. here. As the main protector of liberty in the world it is simply the scariest to watch put bread and circuses above legions. But this Saturday the Citizen reported that Canada has too few police officers to indulge in such luxuries as crime-fighting and quoted former RCMP boss Giuliano Zaccardelli that the Mounties can tackle less than a third of the organized crime they know about. Protecting citizens against foreign attack is the first duty of government and protecting them against domestic attack is a pretty close second, yet our politicians appear to regard both with irritated amusement given so many more politically attractive options for spending way more money than they will ever have.

It doesn't have to be this way. And since politicians including Mr. Obama clearly imagine they are statesmen, let me summon the shade of William Pitt the Younger, who took the helm in Britain at the absurdly precocious age of 24 in 1783, righted the ship of state after the American Revolution and brought it safely through the Napoleonic storms. In steering through these appalling perils Pitt put particular emphasis on restoring the shattered national finances. Before the effort killed him at 46 (after helping his friend William Wilberforce end the slave trade; reckless spending is not a precondition of compassion) Pitt gave no fewer than 17 budget speeches over 19 years on the theme "let us look our difficulties in the face."

Barack Obama should drop the Jimmy Carter trick of dressing up irresolution as resolution and give it a try. He may well fear that voters don't want truth. But statesmen don't let that bother them. There or here.

If citizens squawk that we cannot afford armies or policemen because we are too busy helping ourselves to cake, someone should bluntly opine that we are stupid as well as greedy. As W.H. Auden wrote in the aftermath of 1930s appeasement: "Be frank about our heathen foe,/ For Rome will be a goner/ If you soft-pedal the loud beast;/ Describe in plain four-letter words/ This dragon that's upon her;/ But should our beggars ask the cost,/ Just whistle like the birds;/ Dare even Pope or Caesar know/ The price of faith and honour?"

Nor presidents or prime ministers. And take heart: If you're quoting poetry you must be sophisticated even if you're not clueless.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

As soon as Major Nidal Hasan finished shooting down American soldiers while shouting "Allahu akbar!", we were warned not to jump to conclusions -- by people who promptly jumped to a series of silly and irresponsible ones.

First, many journalists leapt for the "mad vet" stereotype, portraying Maj. Hasan as just one more sad character who snapped under the intolerable strain of military life. The underlying, and insulting, assumption seemed to be that if you were not necessarily insane to want to be a soldier, you probably would be by the time you'd done it.

I pity those who suffer some version of what a less euphemistic age called "shell shock." But to suggest that violent mental illness is more common among those who have worn a uniform is untrue, which surely makes it an unsuitable tool of analysis for sophisticated observers.

A second, related snap conclusion was that even if Maj. Hasan gave a deeply convincing impression of a jihadi, it would be hasty and intolerant to read anything of significance into it. On Remembrance Day The Globe and Mail said, "Whether Major Hasan was motivated by extremist Islamic calls to jihad or broke under the stress of attempting to reconcile his faith with orders to go to war in a Muslim country remains unknown." OK, I'll bite. How do we tell when a guy slaughtering infidels yelling "Allahu akbar!" is a real jihadi and when he just broke under stress? I doubt the bien-pensant would call all jihadis deranged; it might seem culturally insensitive. Do only domestic cases automatically qualify, to forestall any discussion of fifth columns? Let's at least ask.

We cannot avoid these hard questions by euphemistic references to "Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a Muslim opposed to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars ..." as though he had a policy disagreement that got out of hand. This is a man who publicly recommended kuffars be beheaded, then have boiling oil poured down their throats (an impulse to desecrate corpses that is, I might add, profoundly morally disturbed and surprisingly widespread among Taliban types).

Nor can it all be swept under the rug by blaming our bigotry. The deputy director of the American Muslim Armed Forces and Veterans Affairs Council quickly complained that "anytime anyone with an Arabic name is linked to a crime, people immediately draw the conclusion that it was based on his faith." But it wasn't his name, it was the boiling oil/"Allahu akbar" business and his online radicalism. To immediately suggest otherwise was as insulting to Americans as it was incompatible with the facts.

Many jumped to another conclusion that, while superficially sensitive, was profoundly hostile and troubling. Under the simpering headline "Was killer a victim?", for instance, Saturday's Globe called Maj. Hasan a "man under intense stress and torn by irreconcilable loyalties." But let us not swallow that "irreconcilable" untasted. It may be poison.

The real cause for concern here is not Maj. Hasan's claim to put his loyalty to God ahead of his loyalty to his country. Any sincere Christian or Jew must also, surely, put the Supreme Being ahead of the elected one. But Judaism and especially Christianity assign to government subordinate but legitimate secular duties that confer dignity on the state, and command the allegiance of believers within limits. Islam does not.

Islam, not just Islamism, firmly rejects the separation of church and state and therefore the whole concept of "nations." It aspires to unite the whole "ummah" or community of all believers under one government that will impose Godliness in every detail of life from dress to foreign policy to architecture. But if the result is "irreconcilable loyalties" for Muslims in non-Islamic states it has ominous implications.

We need to discuss this proposition, not endorse or reject it unthinkingly. We need to know what they're saying about it in North American mosques. And we cannot evade it by jumping to the conclusion that the whole episode was psychological. Ideas matter, and Maj. Hasan held wicked ones. Who else does?

On Sunday, U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey said: "What happened at Fort Hood is a tragedy. It would be a greater tragedy if diversity became a casualty." But this massacre was not a "tragedy." It was mass murder and treason. And diversity ceases to be a virtue well before the bit where boiling oil goes down the bleeding stump of my infidel neck.

The day after the shooting, President Barack Obama said "I would caution against jumping to conclusions until we have all the facts." OK. But as the facts come in, let's make sure our conclusions fit them.

"Different strokes for different folks" clearly does not qualify given what we've already learned. Anyone who jumps to it and hangs on regardless is a dangerous idiot.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

[First published on Mercatornet.com] Dust motes dance in sunlight slanting down a narrow, tidy corridor. Respectable wallpaper, stairs up one side, two or three doors on the other and a window at the end.

A laughing little girl bursts out of the kitchen and rushes down the hall, golden curls bouncing. As she darts into the room at the end of the hall, a smaller boy, a little unsteady on his pudgy legs, toddles after her, giggling and calling. He totters into the bedroom they share, and after more laughter and a medium-sized crash they tumble out into the hall again and head back toward the kitchen.

Suddenly we hear the sharp, definitive crack of a rifle. The children freeze, puzzled. She puts a protective hand on her baby brother's shoulder and looks anxiously round. Then both children fade and vanish before our eyes. The echoes of their laughter die away, and the corridor is as hopelessly still and empty as a tomb. Nothing will make these dust motes dance, ever.

Who are these children? They have no names. They exist in no one's memories. They were never born, because the shot we just heard killed the soldier who would have been their father in France in the spring of 1917. One careless moment, or just bad luck, cost not only his life but his fiancée's marriage and the children they could one day have had in some decent little apartment above a friendly street in Ohio, Ontario or Victoria. Or Lyons, Bavaria, Liverpool...

Who is the soldier? He has millions of names. Very few now remember the individual dead of the Great War, and even those of World War Two are fast disappearing from living memory. But on November 11th, in Britain, Australia, Canada and elsewhere we will pause briefly in our busy days, turn off our digital devices and bow our heads in honour of those who "gave all their tomorrows for our today". In that list I include those who manned Hadrian's Wall, gathered at Egbert's Stone and slogged through mud at Agincourt as well.

We do not wish we could be in their place. Samuel Johnson said "Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier..." But those with any sense feel this way not because they missed an adventure (though they did) but because they know that those who took up arms against the foe, from Salamis to Afghanistan, risked more for us than we ever will for them and gave, far too often, what no one can begin to repay.

When we weigh their sacrifice and applaud what we cannot recompense, we think of what they lost: the dawns they did not see, the chocolate they never ate, the books they did not read (or write), the love they never gave or received. We should also remember those to whom sons and lovers never returned, the forever empty chairs at Thanksgiving and Christmas, the fading portraits of dashing-looking uncles who were but names to nieces and nephews. And let us recall also, the full measure of sacrifice for many, the children who never laughed, or cried, because those who might have given them life did not live long enough to do so.

War is, indeed, a horrible thing. Those who serve risk not only death but mutilation, madness, and all that might have been without these things. And any parent will tell you the loss of their own life is nothing to the loss of a child. Yet all of this is placed in the scale by those who answer the call of duty, and lost by many of them. So is it worth it?

Some say no. They claim to love life so much that war must be a last resort. Really? Last? Behind surrender, disgrace, submission to genocide? Those who say so do not love more than others, but far, far less. They cannot love children who would raise them to be slaves.

As G.K. Chesterton wrote three years before the "Guns of August" thundered: "The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him." If nothing is worth dying for, nothing is worth living for and nothing is worth living with.

That is why Remembrance Day is not a pacifist occasion. In Canada, at least, we mark November 11th by reciting portions of John McCrae's "In Flanders Fields" and despite the occasional misguided misinterpretations of uneducated educators this lament for the dead is not a call to lay down arms but to take them up. Written in 1915 by a man who lost his own life in 1918 (of pneumonia, but on active duty), it famously begins:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row, That mark our place; and in the sky The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead. Short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved, and were loved, and now we lie In Flanders fields.

But it finishes

Take up our quarrel with the foe: To you from failing hands we throw The torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields.

We ought still to deter war through strength, rather than drift into it through weakness then let the best retrieve at terrible cost the errors of the mentally and morally feeble. But we honour their sacrifice because we know it is the path of duty and of right despite its horrors. And these we remember without flinching because it is all we can do.

Think, then, of all that was lost by those who fell in war. The dawn, the larks, the sunset, yes. But also all the children who, at the crack of a rifle, freeze and fade away and never were.